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Little Fires Everywhere Book Review

My Reasons For Reading This Book

There are three main reasons for why I chose to read Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. The first one is that I had already finished the book for the Podcast book club that I follow (The Readheads Book Club) and I had more than a week before the next episode came out. So in short I was in need of a book to fill time. The second reason is that everywhere I looked people were talking about this book and were recommending it. I also saw that it had tons of reviews on iBooks and Amazon and to me that is an indicator that lots of people have read it and enjoyed it. The third and final reason is that I pay for Hulu and do not use it very often so as an effort to use it more, I thought that by the time I finished reading the book the full series would be on Hulu and then I could watch it right after. 

Content of Little Fires Everywhere 

This book takes place in the 1990s and follows the lives of two families navigating their new connection of landlord, tenant, friends, boyfriend and girlfriend, employer and house manager. Mia Wright is a single-mother raising her daughter Pearl. While Elena Richardson is a married mother of four: Lexie, Trip, Moody and Izzy. The two families come together when Mia and Pearl become the tenants of Elena's family rental property. The families live in Shaker a suburb in Cleveland where every aspect of the suburb is planned. Tensions rise when long-time friend's of Richardsons try to adopt a Chinese-American baby girl. Opinions of the custody battle leads the town to be divided and putting Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Journalist Elena beings digging into the past of her house manager Mia and discovers that everyone has secrets that would rather be kept quite. The book explores the idea of opposing mothering styles and finding your identity.

What I Liked About the Book

One aspect of the book that I really enjoyed was that author Celeste Ng sprinkled fire and spark references throughout the book that further signified the ending/opening scene and gave meaning to those actions and the title of the book. 
The next redeeming quality that this book had is that the character development was spot on. Celeste Ng's ability to develop characters lead me as the reader to be able to predict how each character would react in each situation because I understood each of them so well. 
Going along with the character development, the author was successfully able to switch the voice writing style depending on each character. The inner thoughts of each character matched their personality and could be easily identified. 

What I Disliked About the Book

The first things that really bothered me about this book was the writing style. I can see why this book was turned into a Hulu original series because the writing style could easily be translated to a tv script. In my opinion the writing style is more of a tv script than a well written book. The writing style was very basic and elementary. From the raving reviews of this book I would have expected a better written book with more literary qualities. 
Another aspect of the book that really turned me off was the excessive amount of detail for characters that ended up having little benefit to the overall plot or progression of the story. I found that the author waisted time and space by describing in detail characters who would only have a brief part in the plot. One thing that made me apprehensive to read this book is that it was so long and I only had a short window to read it before the next book in my book club would be announced. Because I am a slow reader I need to stay on top of reading. I feel that this book could have been a lot shorter in length if the author would not have included the unnecessary details of unimportant characters. 
To continue talking about the length of the book, I found that the chapter and division of the book made no sense. I do not understand the way in which the content of the book was divided into the 20 chapters. Yes, the chapters did somewhat signify a day or a period of time, but that was not made clear while reading. I only came to this conclusion while reflecting on this aspect of the book. To me the structure of the 20 chapters were more of stoping and starting points for reading and really had more benefit to how the book was sectioned. 
Next, I found that the beginning of the book completely laid out the ending of the book and left the reader with little to no surprise. Yes, the beginning of the book was intriguing, but it also led to a predictable ending. I would have liked a little more surprise or more twists than what the book offered. I thought the author set the book up to be more predicable than I would have liked. Since I knew how the book was going to end, I liked it less than if there would have been more suspense. 

Would I Recommend This Book

I am sad to say that what I disliked about this book was so significant that it lead me to not like it. I would said that I mildly enjoyed reading this book. With having finished the book and started watching the Hulu original series, I would recommend the series over reading the book. I would only recommend the book if you are in need of an easy to read, beach summer read or if you want to read the book before watching the series. Overall I would not recommend this book to anyone who asked me for a recommendation. This book did not live up to the expectations that I had from reading reviews prior to reading it myself.

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